Amends
by Pit Viper of Doom
Summary: All Estelle wants is for things to be the way they were before Alexei imprisoned her. But even in her eyes, Raven has a lot to make up for.
1. Remorse

"Welcome back."

"It's nice to _be_ back."

That was an understatement. Free from her magical prison, Estelle felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Limp as a ragdoll, trembling, and once more entirely in control of her body, Estelle allowed herself to relax for the first time. Her head was swimming as her panic eased, and she struggled to swallow the terror and despair she had been feeling near-constantly since... since...

She realized then that Yuri was talking to her, too late to register what he said. "What?" The princess blinked at him, focusing on his face. He had always been a reassuring, protective presence before, and reassurance was what she needed at the moment.

"I said, can you stand?"

"I... I think so," she replied, feeling embarrassed when her mind added, _if you help me_. She didn't want to say it. Already he and the rest of her friends had tracked her across Terca Lumireis to rescue her; she couldn't ask any more of him than he'd already done.

He understood. He always understood. Carefully, Yuri took hold of her arms, and together they got to their feet. At the moment, the relieved smile he was giving her was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

"I-I'm all right," she stammered as he released her. Her friends had all gathered around her: Yuri, Judith, Karol, and Rita were there, looking overjoyed. Even Repede stepped forward to give her hand a sniff, and she could have sworn that in the split second before he turned away, the look in the dog's single blue eye was one of concern. Still shaking, but feeling miles better than she had been, Estelle returned their smiles. "Thank you, all of you. I—" In her effort to avoid having to lean on Yuri for balance, she overcompensated and listed backward dangerously.

A firm hand on her shoulder stopped her from falling over again. She turned her head, an apology or a word of thanks at the tip of her tongue, and caught sight of the olive-skinned hand, the loose, rich purple sleeve, and...

Estelle flinched.

She didn't mean to. She couldn't help it. She'd seen him fighting alongside her friends, protecting them, watching their backs, helping them free her, being their _friend_... But what if it was all an act again? Did they know?

Raven's hand left her shoulder as quickly as if she'd slapped him. In the space of a second, Estelle saw a startling flurry of emotions flit across his face. A look of hurt became one of dismay, followed by regret, sympathy, and something that looked very close to fear.

"It's okay, Estelle," Judith broke the brief tense silence, ever the calm presence of the group. "We know what happened."

Rita, now standing the closest to Raven, shot him a dirty look. "And it _won't_ happen again." As if to emphasize her point, she drove her elbow into his side. Surprisingly, she did so marginally more gently than she normally did, since Raven only winced a little.

"It's kind of a long story," Karol added, fidgeting slightly.

"Speaking of which, Flynn will probably want to know about all this," Yuri said dryly. He turned his head to grin at each one of them before starting back down the Sword Stair. "C'mon. Let's get down from here before Zagi shows up or something." Estelle followed him, Rita moving to hover by her side.

"Try not ta jinx it, will ya?" Raven quipped as he passed Estelle, sounding too eager to slip back into the familiar easy banter. Before, it had been a little annoying, yet strangely endearing in a way that was uniquely Raven. Now, it sounded shallow and forced.

"Hey, we're all back together now," Rita broke in, not appearing to notice. "The last thing I wanna think about is that creep." The young mage gave Estelle a tap on the arm with her fist. "Try not to scare us again like that, will you?"

"Sorry I had you all worried," Estelle said sheepishly.

"I'm just glad to have you back," Karol was quick to tell her, his cheeky smile back on his face. "You know us. Whenever you need us, Estelle, Brave Vesperia'll be there and give a hundred percent!"

"Besides, it's not like it was your fault, anyway," Judith pointed out sensibly.

Without meaning to, Estelle shot a furtive glance at Raven. It was hard to look at him now. The last time she'd seen him before the ordeal that Alexei had put her through was back in Myorzo, right before he'd taken her and delivered her straight into the ex-Commandant's hands.

And here he was, flanking Yuri and doing his very best to act like none of it had happened.

An almost alien emotion burned within Estelle. It wasn't quite anger, but it was close enough that she didn't like it and wanted it gone. The young princess looked around at her friends, remembered all the things they'd done together, how she'd come to love them and watch them fight and laugh and grow alongside her, and in spite of herself, she smiled. Her gaze turned Raven again, and her smile remained without a twitch. But it felt wrong, as shallow and forced as Raven's earlier lighthearted quip.

She was reunited with her friends, and they were all alive and well. So why did she feel so awful?

* * *

><p>"...Well, once we figured that part out, it was easy gettin' up ta the Sword Stair, and I think ya know the rest after that." Raven went quiet, tilting his head slightly as he looked to his audience for a reaction.<p>

Estelle was silent for a long time, arms crossed, staring at the floor as she slowly absorbed all she had just heard.

Before her, Raven stood uneasily, looking for all the world like an accused man awaiting a grim verdict.

"So... you were helping him because he saved your life," Estelle said slowly. "Alexei, I mean." It made sense; Schwann Oltorain was a decorated knight, and knights were supposed to be known for their honor. Her friends had all saved her life at some point, and she felt the need to repay them all the time.

But that didn't make this _right_.

"It ain't that, Estelle," Raven went on with a weary sigh. "Alexei didn't save my life. There was nothin' left ta save. I was _dead_. Thing about dyin'... if ya come back, ya find there ain't a lot to live for. Alexei was the only reason I was still breathin'; there was nothin' else I could do but follow 'im. I'm livin' on borrowed time with this thing." He shifted aside his coat and the collar of his shirt, revealing the blastia glowing in his breast.

Estelle struggled with herself, returning her gaze to the floor. She understood now why he'd done what he'd done; he'd had reasons. Judith had had her reasons for destroying blastia, and even Rita had found it in herself to forgive her. Both Judith and Raven, too, had seen their mistakes for what they were, and seemed to have become better people for it.

But Judith had never harmed them. She had raised her weapon against blastia, but never against them. She had never betrayed them, or allowed a treacherous madman to imprison them and wield them like tools. Raven had.

Estelle felt as though her blood had turned to ice water as a single cold realization struck.

She couldn't forgive Raven, just like that, the way she had forgiven Judith. She just _couldn't_. No matter how much she told herself that Raven had legitimate reasons for what he did, or that he had changed and was siding with them permanently, she couldn't.

Estelle looked up and met Raven's eyes squarely. "Okay," she said decisively. "But you have to let me do the same thing everyone else did."

For a moment Raven looked somewhat bewildered. "What—"

Estelle's hand cracked hard against the side of his face. The force of the blow whipped his head to the side, and his hand went to the now tender spot she'd struck.

"_Ow_," he said emphatically, sounding honestly taken aback by the blow. He rubbed his jaw ruefully. "...Deserved that."

"Now we're even," Estelle informed him, feeling somewhat better. It was only somewhat, and already she felt uncomfortable about hitting him, but she told herself not to let it show. She even smiled at him, but it felt forced. The pangs of ugly resentment that came when she had looked at him before were lessening, but they weren't going away. Suddenly she longed to be somewhere else. "Well, thank you for telling me, Raven," she went on, a bit quietly. "I have to go now; Rita said she wanted to try something with my power."

"Yeah," Raven said distractedly, still nursing his jaw. "See ya later, then."

Estelle turned away before he could see her bite her lip. She rarely told a lie, but it had seemed appropriate. After all, the following morning would see them on their way to Zaude, and one way or another, she was going with them. They were far from even, but it would have to do.

She'd been overjoyed, once, to have so many friends after eighteen years of almost none. But no one had ever told her how much friendship could _hurt_.

* * *

><p><strong>Because even kind-hearted princesses have limits, and what Estelle went through on Raven's account was probably hers.<strong>


	2. Reconciliation

"_Look me in the eye! Estelle!"_

"_Estelle, snap out of it!"_

"_Come back to us! _Estelle!_ ...Are you just going to let your life end like this? Like someone else's tool?"_

_She had been here before already. She knew what came next; her own words were burned into her memory._

I want to... I want to be myself! I want to keep on _living_!

_She tried to force her mouth to form the words, strained to break free of the puppet strings, but her lips were frozen, her arms leaden. Something was wrong. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be._

_Compelled against her will by a force beyond her understanding, she lunged at her friend, her blade humming through the air toward his chest._

Estelle sat bolt upright, gasping aloud in the dark. Her back ached; she'd drifted off to sleep while sitting on the edge of her bed. She wasn't altogether sure how long she'd slept, hunched over with her arms crossed in her lap and her forehead resting against her wrist, and for her first few seconds of wakefulness she didn't care. Instinctively she covered her mouth with her hand, muffling her thin whimpers as she breathed deeply to calm her nerves. After a moment, her racing heart eased, and she wiped a few beads of sweat from her forehead. Her slumber had been anything but restful, and from the looks of things it had only lasted a few minutes, leaving her miserable and exhausted.

For a moment, she considered lying down properly and going back to sleep, but the memory of her nightmare was still fresh in her half-awake mind. She dreaded closing her eyes any longer than it took to blink, for fear she would return to that awful world, where her sword was inches from Yuri's heart.

Estelle fought back tears, feeling embarrassed with herself. Crying over nightmares was for children, after all. Yuri was fine, they were all fine, and no amount of dreaming on her part would change that. Besides, if someone happened to passed by her door, they might hear her.

It was a bit of a struggle, but Estelle managed to get to her feet. She hadn't meant to fall asleep in the first place, but she'd been so _tired_. Had she slept at all since her imprisonment? She wasn't altogether certain.

But she couldn't sleep now. She needed to think, and she thought better on her feet, out in the open. Quietly, she slipped out of her room, relieved that there were no guards posted outside, and padded through the halls that she had walked for nearly all her life.

So much had happened, so much had changed, for better or for worse, that she needed to take in and consider.

For starters, the succession crisis was more or less over. She would never rule the Empire; that was Ioder's job now. Estelle had no problem with this.

Secondly, and more importantly, she was free of the limitations Alexei had forced upon her, thanks to Rita. She could move freely without worry, and without offending any Entelexeia with her existence, now that she could use her power without disturbing aer. At least, she thought that was how it was; she was still a little vague on the details of Rita's explanation. The important thing was that she was more or less free to go back to the way she was before, even before she'd met Yuri. Her only concern would be that to use artes would be to tap her own life force.

So she was a little like Raven, now.

That was another thing she had to consider: Raven. And what to do now went hand in hand with that. Before, she had been so certain about joining her friends on their journey to Zaude. The problem of artes and her life force now made her stop and think about that decision, and Raven was part of it.

She could have a normal life, without worrying about monsters, difficult travel, friends who might betray her, or power-hungry men who would use her for ill. If she did go, she would risk her life every time she healed her friends, and she wasn't sure how useful she would be if she joined them before truly settling things with Raven.

Estelle wanted to trust him; she would have loved nothing more. But something held her back. Perhaps it was her unconscious desire to smile and pretend she was the same starry-eyed dreamer of a princess, biting back her real thoughts, or perhaps it was the awkward detachment she sensed in him whenever he spoke to her now. Either way, the emotional standoff was agonizing, and if she were truly honest with herself, it was her only real misgiving about accompanying Brave Vesperia.

After all, her friends risked their lives constantly. She was prepared to do the same in a heartbeat.

The princess stepped through the doorway of the entrance hall, her eyelids drooping slightly as she stared up at the moonlight streaming through the windows and mulled over her problems. So absorbed was she in her thoughts, coupled with the fog of weariness, that she didn't realize she was not alone until a familiar voice hailed her from across the room.

"What're ya doin' wanderin' 'round at this hour, darlin'?"

* * *

><p>Raven usually slept more easily on a prison cell cot than he ever had in his own room in the castle. He knew that this was because it had never really been <em>his<em> room so much as Schwann's. He knew that Raven was the only one who slept in the prison cells, he knew that he enjoyed being Raven a great deal more than he enjoyed being Schwann, and he knew that that probably spoke volumes about Damuron, though that poor bastard hadn't seen the light of day for ten years.

Though perhaps his dismissal of the late Schwann Oltorain was a bit unfair, he reasoned as he pulled the cell door open and picked his way restlessly toward the main hall. Schwann had been a suave, mysterious, stunningly handsome knight, after all. But he had also been a whiny, emotionally constipated bore, not to mention seven shades of messed up and a complete and utter _tool_, in every sense of the word.

And yet, it was Raven who now strode restlessly toward the entrance hall, wrestling with his own guilt.

Raven had been a mask at the start, just a face, a name, and a fancy purple coat, all for the sake of keeping Alexei's fingers in the Union's pies. And yet, he'd been more than that; he'd been a roguish smile, a casual wisecrack, an easy pickup line, an arrow between a monster's eyes, and most of all a friend. Certainly more than Schwann the Tool had ever been (a caricature, a puppet, a pantomime, a sad imitation of life), that was for sure. And so, the man who had once been Damuron and was not quite Schwann began to love the mask that was Raven, and his face grew to fit it. Then one day he woke up to discover that Schwann had become the mask, and Raven the real person hiding behind it for Alexei's benefit, until it was finally claimed by the collapsing ceiling in the deepest part of Baction.

Schwann was gone, and it was Raven, now, who had to live with the things he had done.

Raven breathed a sigh of relief as the corridor opened to the entrance hall. He was surprised to find that he was not alone; Estelle was standing at the doorway opposite him, wandering in as though she was sleepwalking.

Contrary to what Rita might say, Raven was not an idiot (he just acted like one sometimes). He could see the falseness in Estelle's smiles and kind words, and the way her face seemed to freeze whenever she looked at him. It reminded him, painfully, of her desperate plea for death, and of Yuri's harsh question. _"Are you just going to let your life end like this? Like someone else's tool?"_

And not that long after saying something eerily similar to Raven himself, either. It was a cold wake-up call for him, to realize how close Alexei had come to turning that sweet girl into another Schwann.

_Schwann, ya dumb bastard, ya stabbed 'er in the back an' left me ta take the rap._

A lump formed in his throat, but he swallowed it and greeted her as politely as Raven could manage.

"What're ya doin' wanderin' 'round at this hour, darlin'?"

She glanced down, startled – she'd been staring up at the windows – and blinked several times before she seemed to recognize him.

"Oh," she said, with a false cheeriness that mingled with a heavy amount of fatigue. "Hello, Raven."

Raven approached her, feeling stupidly shy as he did. Moonlight illuminated her face, and the dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked exhausted.

"Trouble sleepin'?" he asked, with a valiant attempt to sound casual.

"It's nothing," she assured him, rubbing her eyes. "Just a bad dream, that's all."

Which wasn't very surprising, Raven thought with another pang of guilt and a most certainly un-Raven-like desire to remedy it somehow. There was so much she was holding back; he could see the strain of it in her glassy, drooping eyes. She wanted so much for things to be normal that she was holding back... well, everything. That kind of thing couldn't be healthy.

He only meant it as a joke, as an attempt to make her smile, even if it was fake. Hey, maybe if she faked a smile enough, it'd stop being fake. It had worked with him, hadn't it?

Still, he would never truly understand what compelled him to hold out his arms and offer, "How 'bout a hug?"

"I..." _...don't think so_, she was supposed to say, and cringe timidly away from him. It was the way she had before, and she was all about making things the way they were before, wasn't she?

He never expected to look her in the eye and see something break.

He never expected her to close the distance between them in three steps and seize him in a tight hug, her arms around his middle, her face buried in his chest.

Raven froze, dumbfounded. This wasn't the sort of thing that happened to him, whether he called himself Raven or Schwann. He fought down a sudden wave of panic as he realized that, for one of the few times in his life, he had no idea what he was supposed to do.

There was a high-pitched sob as Estelle drew a breath, and she spoke in a small voice that somehow managed to balance anger and hurt.

"How _could_ you?" she demanded, her quavering voice slightly muffled by his shirt. "_How could you?_ I trusted you, Raven. I thought— I thought you were my—"

"Estelle, darlin', I—"

"I _know_," she interrupted, sounding almost angry as her tears soaked into his shirt. "I _know_ why you did it, I _know_ you didn't have a choice, but... but you still did it, and it _hurts._" Her voice broke on the last word.

Raven stared down at her, at a loss for words as the normally sweet-natured princess tearfully raged on.

"He made me _hurt people_," she continued mercilessly. "H-he tried to make me kill Yuri, and Rita, and Karol, and Repede, and Judith, and... and _you_. And you—you just... handed me over to him. L-like I was just some... _thing_. He _hurt_ me, and... and you_ let him!_"

Estelle broke off, weeping angrily into his chest, though gradually her fury eased even if her tears did not.

For a moment, Raven could only stare down at her in dismay. He wavered uncertainly, and then encircled her protectively in his arms, embracing her and offering what comfort he could as she wept brokenly. He rested his chin on her head, absently wondering if this could possibly be enough.

"Estelle, darlin', I'm sorry," he murmured. Apologizing now seemed criminally useless, so he shut his mouth and silently held her close. For the first time, Raven found himself honestly at a loss for words.

Luckily, it seemed someone else was not.

The slow, refined, sincere tone and diction of his next words were nearly alien to him now.

"I am so, _so_ sorry, Princess Estellise. Truly I am." His arms tightened around her. "Forgive me."

Raven blinked, surprised at himself. Maybe he hadn't given ol' Schwann enough credit, after all.

He was still a tool, though.

Estelle's arms relaxed slightly, and she sniffled. "I..." she stammered, her voice wavering. "I forgive you." There was a note of wonder in her voice, and of intense relief. "_I forgive you_."

Three words lifted a burden from both their shoulders. Raven straightened his back and held her firmly, while Estelle sighed and seemed to relax against him. It took him a moment to realize that she had fallen asleep on her feet.

With a sigh, (because really, who was he going to have to carry next? Yuri?) he lifted her up as gently as he could and trudged down the hall toward her room.

"Must be getting' soft in my old age," he muttered, ignoring the annoying voice in his head that reminded him that he was only thirty-five.

Her bedroom door was ajar when he reached it; nudging it open with his foot, he slipped inside and placed the sleeping girl on her bed. After a moment of hesitation and pride-swallowing, he pulled a blanket over her before he left.

Well. If redemption was the journey, not the destination, then this was as good a step as any.

Raven was feeling a great deal better once he reached his familiar old prison cell. Maybe you could teach an old dog new tricks after all, though he was willing to bet that Repede would knife him for that turn of phrase.

Maybe Schwann was gone and wasn't coming back any more than Damuron was, but there were still bits and pieces of Captain Schwann Oltorain left. Lessons learned and taught, a rare sincere smile that he normally reserved for LeBlanc and the brigade when they did well, that he now found himself aiming at Karol once in a while. They were part of Raven, now, and Raven sure as hell wasn't going anywhere.

* * *

><p><strong>So I gave Schwann a last little hurrah, there. I'd throw in a "swan song" joke, but that would just make me sound pretentious.<strong>

**Man, I love Raven.  
><strong>


End file.
